Morning Skim: Rudy Again

Does anyone but anyone interpret this as anything other than pure political calculation? He needs conservative upstate votes to beat Cuomo so suddenly he’s drawing a line in the sand over gay marriage? Why not embrace gay marriage, make headlines nationwide as a “progressive” Republican on the issue, and fight Cuomo on the issue of fiscal conservatism? The gay-marriage bill is going to pass in New York with heavy margins in favor. Get on the right side of it, make your mark, and then take a stand on the hill of the economy. Hard to read this as anything other than Rudy still harboring national ambitions, which is nutty.

National Review: Lisa Schiffren responds to the Rudy Giuliani statement yesterday to a reporter that he was considering a run for governor of New York but, as paraphrased in the report, in “no rush to make up his mind”:

I like Giuliani. I supported him in the primaries and I wish he were president now, regardless of his flaws. He is far and away the best hope for the state GOP, and for New York State in general. . . . But that “no rush to make up his mind” business is exactly the same equivocating nonsense that cost him even a reasonable shot at the presidential nomination last year. It screams: “I’m not serious.” And all of his financial backers know that, having learned the hard way.

Foreign Policy: Laura Rozen tries to place the Jane Harman wiretap story in the context of last week’s release of the Bush torture memos, talking with an anonymous former senior U.S. intelligence officer who “wondered if the timing of this story was about changing the subject, from what Bush-era officials had authorized, to what the Congress was complicit in.”

Nieman Journalism Lab: Matthew Ingram takes note of a new Google News feature and wonders why a newspaper didn’t get there first:

As many people probably know by now, Google came out with another of its Google Labs features on Monday: a Google News timeline view, which gives users the ability to see and scroll through headlines, photos and news excerpts by day/week/month/year. . . .

One question kept nagging at me as I was looking at this . . . and that was: Why couldn’t a news organization have done this? (I’m not the only one to wonder this). Why not a newspaper, or even a collective like Associated Press (which seems to prefer threats to creativity)? Isn’t delivering the news in creative and interesting ways that appeal to readers what we are supposed to be doing? Apparently not.

Salon: Andrew Leonard says yesterday’s drop in the Dow “must be one of those rare cases where the insta-wisdom of the markets has actually gotten something right. Because the closer you look at nearly all the recently reported numbers, the worse they get.”

Never mind the absurdity in which Goldman Sachs conveniently erased December, a month in which the company lost billions of dollars, from its accounting books by including it neither in the first quarter of this year nor the last quarter of 2008. . . . Never mind that Citigroup somehow managed the magic trick of turning the fact that its debt was losing value into an accounting profit. . . .

The real worries come when you look at what is happening in the world of the consumer. Credit card losses are surging, loans are going delinquent, and everyone is sitting on what little cash they have. For banks that have a large retail component, that’s a problem that is only going to get worse.

With the genius of prepayment penalties, banks didn’t have to make money by lending loans to credible homeowners – they could form a de facto company with unqualified borrowers to bet on house prices rising. The prepayment penalty was the bank’s equity in this endeavor. Or another way to say it, is that the bank found a way to hire a person to sit in a house they wanted to gamble on; this way was a subprime loan with a prepayment penalty.

The fact that it took so long, and the angle is that she is anti industry (as opposed to anti industry bad behavior, a distinction that will hopefully be lost on the masses) and it took comparatively long to mount the salvo (Warren has been a critic of predatory lending for a long time, and hasn’t been too happy with the Treasury’s handling of the TARP since she first took an official look) suggests that attempts to find real dirt on her did not pan out.

Given that banks have an increasingly bad name in mainstream America, this effort to denigrate her may not stick. But the attempt to paint her as biased is nevertheless a nasty bit of work.

Meeting with Obama was actually probably riskier for Hugo Chavez than for Obama. Because if they met and Obama turned out to be engaging, a good listener, respectful of Hugo Chavez, then when Chavez returns home, it could be much harder for him to paint Obama as a “Yankee imperialist,” to blame the United States for his problems, including the economic problems that are now facing his government. There was a poll done right before the summit that showed Obama is the most respected, the most popular leader in all of Latin America, including Hugo Chavez. So it would be very hard for Chavez to stand up and be disrespectful to Obama because he’s much more popular than Chavez at this moment. So there’s a tension for Chavez in terms of how to come out well, and so he tried to straddle that by being friendly with Obama but also trying to take the limelight, as he is often prone to do.

Doesn’t anybody remember that, during his divorce from Donna Hanover, Mr. Giuliani and his then-not-wife Judith were living with a gay couple–a rich guy and his pianist partner?

What crass hypocrisy not to support same-sex marriage!

I guess Mr. Giuliani considers it too good for the “average” GLBT person–but, if you have enough money, your sexual orientation will be overlooked but not protected. Kind of reminds me of life in the Third Reich, when world-renowned artistic figures could be “aryanized.”

Mr. Guliani is no doubt one of the stupidest individuals yet to run for public office. He is old news and bad news. Obama got elected based on the poverty of ideas and utter lack of conscience of the Republican Party. Guliani is the poster boy of failed ideology and intellectual dishonesty. Let’s move on.

How could anyone take Rudy “Just One More Marriage” Giuliani serious as a spokesman for traditional marriage? His performance at the Republican National Convention in 2008 showed the world the true Rudy – an egotistical clown. If he decides to run for Govenor, maybe he should pick Bernie Kerek as his Lt. Governor running mate.

We must elect Guiliani as governor. He’s the only one who can get the state back on track. He’s a solid Republican with traditional values. His integrity is unmatched by any others in the party. He should be our president now!

Rudy would have better served this nation as the national drag queen, bowing occasionally to the Donald, and wearing a red sox cap at that. His political career was nothing more than a masquerade. There never was in the history of mankind such a thing as same sex marriage, but here in the land of milk and honey we have come to embrace slogans of little importance, a by product of madison avenue madness perhaps. Same sex sham is what these purveyors of patheticality created in the labyrinth of the land of lisp.

Separation of church and state are just that, the state has no right in the realm of the house of GOD. marriage is and always was an honorable and noble gift from the creator himself between man and woman. How dare the state change the order of mankind and make a mockery of what GOD has chosen as his blessing to send new life into this world. Marriage is GODS domain and he does not create nor ever will men for men, or women for women. Let them take their mockery to another land.

RE- Naked Capitalism: The banks and corporations are still running Congress and steering the country’s financial control, despite having demonstrated their utter lack of responsibility and running the US and the world into a recession/depression.

Congress continues to be controlled by those that finance its re-elections, to the detriment of all citizens.
All financial contributions and their equivalents (Harman’s request of AIPAC) are really bribery, something that is illegal for all outside of Congress.

Until we get control of how Congress is influenced by others than voters, this nation will decline further and further.

Why is Giuliani still on stage? His 15 minutes were up long ago. A guy who was parading his mistress around while he was still legally married to the mother of his children has no credibility making any kind of comments at all about sexual morality or the marriage bond. The fact that he doesn’t seem to realise that is sufficient comment on both his ego and his intellect.

Guiliani is poison, in general, and a blatant racist to boot. I will never forget his campaign speech at a police rally when he was running for mayor against David Dinkins in 1990 and referred to the latter as “That son of a janitor”. Feh.

#11 derris lantos is living proof that nobody every went broke underestimating the intelligence of the…..rudy as a defender of tradtional values!? how many marriages, how much philandering and how sleazy does one have to be to not have traditional values…..?

“Separation of church and state are just that, the state has no right in the realm of the house of GOD. marriage is and always was an honorable and noble gift from the creator himself between man and woman..”

Separation of church and state are really just that: the state has no right in the realm of religion, just as religion has no right in the realm of marriage, which is a civil, NOT religious, concept. Church arrogated to itself the ceremony of marriage but, even so, without a CIVIL marriage license, a church marriage will not be recognized outside of that church.

And how DARE you to presume to interpret God’s will! YOU are NOT God. If there are people who are gay, is that not part of God’s ineffable wisdom? Or do you and your like again presume to question that?

Think again on Matthew 7: 1-5 and Luke 6: 37-38, before you presume to judge others.

Take it easy on the poor Republican candidates – to march to the incessant beat of their drum masters, they must perform contortionist acts beyond the skills of even the great Houdini. As McCain, Romney, and now “Noun Verb 9/11″ Giuliani have learned to their chagrin, the constantly changing positions they have had to adopt are not dissimilar to the positions detailed in the Bybee/Woo memos – pure torture. Sadly, that leaves only “consistent” kooks and wingnuts to lead the GOP into the abyss.

“Separation of church and state are just that, the state has no right in the realm of the house of GOD. marriage is and always was an honorable and noble gift from the creator himself between man and woman. How dare the state change the order of mankind and make a mockery of what GOD has chosen as his blessing to send new life into this world. Marriage is GODS domain and he does not create nor ever will men for men, or women for women. Let them take their mockery to another land.”
Fine, if it is Gods domain, let us remove all societal civil recognition and benefits from marriage. Let everybody have to get lawyers to define their relationships to give them the basic rights of visiting their loved ones on their death beds, I don’t recall God saying anything about survivor benefits or pensions so let’s get rid of those too.
Perhaps we should limit marriage to only those who are willing and able to procreate.

Rudi is a joke and an absolute idiot…. so whats new. All of a sudden mr. “town whore” has a moral compass – too bad he did not use it a few years ago to control his behavior with the woman he cheated on his wife with. That anyone with any sense listens to this man simply leaves me in total confusion.

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The Thread is an in-depth look at how the major news events and controversies of the day are being viewed and debated across the online spectrum. Compiled by Peter Catapano, an editor in The Times’s Opinion section, the Thread is published every Saturday in response to breaking news.